Disembodied Eyebrows

"Don't be afraid — they're only eyebrows."

"Don't forget the eyebrows that hover mysteriously over my head!"

— Ruff Ruffman, FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman

In comics, webcomics and animation, eyebrows are very important to conveying expression, so it's important that they be seen. To this end, they sometimes actually float several inches above the character's head, or are otherwise clearly unattached. This may be a feature of the art at all times, or it may signify that the character in question is just that surprised. A subtrope of Unusual Eyebrows.

It doesn't have to be just eyebrows - watch enough animation and you'll eventually see disembodied whiskers and even entire body parts that appear to float separate from the main body.

If they're on the face but showing through the hair, that's Oddly Visible Eyebrows.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Cryptoland: One of Connie's main features are the eyebrows above his coin body.
• The M&M's' "spokecandies" all have disembodied black eyebrows.
• The Trix Rabbit, more obviously noticeable at some times than others, depending on which angle he's shown from.
• Cap'n Crunch. They're on his hat. Friends gives us this exchange:
  Joey: Man, this is weird. Ever realize that Cap'n Crunch's eyebrows are actually on his hat?
  Chandler: That's what's weird? Joey, the man's been captain of a cereal for the last forty years.

Anime and Manga

• Lampshaded in FLCL, where it turns out that Commander Amuro's eyebrows are actually fake, and made of nori [dried seaweed]. Amuro's eyebrows even work as a shield to protect the wearer from the head-pulling thing Haruko does. They're not even fake, inked eyebrows. They are actual seaweed, scanned and inserted into the anime, making the whole shebang look even more wrong.

Asian Animation

• The King from Season 8 of Happy Heroes has eyebrows that can be seen in front of his crown.
• In the Motu Patlu episode "Alien Patlu", Patlu is given a pair of extra eyes through an injection from Dr. Jhatka. The resulting eyestalks have eyebrows that float above them.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Uncle Crab from the season Adventures in the Sea has bushy eyebrows that can be seen floating over his eyes, though only when he makes certain facial expressions.
• Dhokla and Vada of Simple Samosa both have eyebrows that float above their eyes.
• All of the characters in Oddbods have their eyebrows attached to the top of their jumpsuits, rather than their faces.
• The characters from Tik Tak Tail have floating eyebrows.

Comedy

• A Paul Merton routine had him explaining to a potential job applicant that interviews always measure a person by the height of their eyebrows on their head, and thus the ideal candidate would have eyebrows floating five inches above their head (in true Paul Merton style, this escalated into a discussion of someone's eyebrows being so high they got attached to the front of a train passing over his head).

Comic Books

• Comic artist Phil Foglio is rather fond of these.
• Amulet has Miskit, prominently featured on the cover (and the page image).
• Drawn in a similar style to Miskit from the Amulet example are the Bone cousins, from Bone. Fone Bone in particular will sometimes be drawn with several sets of eyebrows; all of them disembodied.

Comic Strips

• FoxTrot had its distinctive (-:333 (best approximation).
• Snoopy of Peanuts is sometimes seen with these, such as seen here.
• Wade the Duck from the U.S. Acres comics has these. It also carries this to the Garfield TV series as well.

Films — Animation

• Not the film itself, but most illustrations of Finding Dory for advertising would have disembodied eyebrows on the characters. This is mostly done, due to the fact it'll be difficult to illustrate emotion.
• Globehunters: An Around The World In 80 Days Adventure: Trevor's eyebrows, when they're not resting on the rims of his Eye Glasses, are floating just above them.
• Fear in the Disney / Pixar film Inside Out(pictured above) has these pretty much out of necessity, as the character doesn't have any head above his huge eyes. The movie subtly makes some fun of this at one point when Anger knocks Fear to the ground, leaving Fear's eyebrows to slowly float down after him.
• Played with in Robots. Many characters have eyebrows that aren't attached to their face, but to tiny rotoscoping bars on top of their actual eyes. This means they effectively have eyebrows that float around on their own, despite being clearly attached to their bodies.

Literature

• In some scenes in the picture book Hanna Hippo's Horrible Hiccups, a book in the Animal Antics A to Z series, the title character is depicted as having disembodied eyebrows. Other characters are depicted with these as well.
• In the children's picture book Are We There, Yeti?, the yeti, who is a bus driver, has these. So does at least one of the young yeti later in the book, while another has the eyebrows on the face and still others appear to have no eyebrows whatsoever.
• Disembodied whiskers are seen on the mouse character in the children's picture book Such a Little Mouse, written by Alice Shertle and illustrated by Stephanie Yue.
• In the graphic novel series The Bad Guys, everyone's eyebrows tend to float above their head most of the time.

Theater

• John Tartagalia's Imaginocean has two fish named Whipper and Snapper who are essentially the equivalent of Statler and Waldorf. Whipper's eyebrow on the right side appears to be disembodied.

Video Games

• Swampy in Where's My Water?
• In Donkey Kong Country, when jumping on the boss Master Necky (or his Underground Monkey version), his eyebrows would jump off.
• Most characters in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• Worms has this, so much so that the idle worms will occasionally pull their eyebrows down and wear them as mustaches.
• While averted in 3D renders and artwork, 2D artwork of the Super Mario Bros. franchise tends to feature these, with eyebrows appearing on top of hat brims.
• Seen on some if not most Non-Player Characters in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
• Bug: Bug's eyebrows are shown floating above his head in the boxart.
• In the few instances where he's actually drawn with eyebrows, the hero of the eponymous Earthworm Jim games is shown with eyebrows that don't actually connect to any part of his face, instead hovering an inch or so over his outsized eyeballs.
• Among Us features the option to add expressive Henry Stickmin Series-style eyebrows floating above your crewmate's visor as a hat option.
• An extreme yet humorous example in Hole from Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment. Hole is an invisible alien... invisible, that is, except for his eyebrows, which are his only means to emote. As such, they are so disembodied that he is sometimes perceived as only eyebrows, appearing to have no body at all.^{For the record}Hole is a nickname; his proper full name is "Holy Shit He's Invisible Except For His Eyebrows."

Web Animation

• Trogdor from Homestar Runner.

Web Comics

• Travis in Subculture has eyebrows which cross onto his hat at times.
• Narbonic, particularly early on.
• Fuzzy from Sam & Fuzzy, even lampshaded at one point.
  • Mr. Sin embodies the trope - even forgetting to put his eyebrows on.
• EVIL: The eyebrows often go past the side of characters' faces when they are standing at a 3/4 angle. Also, Professor Dastard's overlap with his hat.
• Schlock Mercenary gives these to several beings that aren't supposed to have eyebrows, apparently to make them more expressive. Ennesby the floating robot head could feasibly have unattached eyebrows, and at one point mentions rolling himself down the stairs with them. The cloned lawyer-serpents and cyclopic Uniocs have no such justification, and one of the latter takes these to their logical extreme when he gets half his head blown off.
• The titular character of The Book of Biff. He has a similarly disembodied mouth.
• In 1/0, Terra's eyebrows are suspended over her general head-area (she's an earthworm). This is eventually explained. (Her facial features aren't attached very solidly either, but they are attached, at least.)
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Bob himself, certainly (his rectangular eyebrows are sometimes visible above his head even when viewed from the rear), Princess Voluptua's antenna eyebrows, and the other castmembers intermittently.
• Part of Phil Foglio's Signature Style, the creator of Girl Genius.
• Done in Gunnerkrigg Court when Parley confesses her love to Andrew.
• When visible, eyebrows in The Order of the Stick stick out from the characters' heads most of the time. Especially notable with Blackwing the raven.
• In Air Force Blues, eyebrows float on the forehead, usually right on the hairline.
• In Commander Kitty, Nin Wah's eye brows seem to float in front of her headband and hair.
• Eyebrows in Satan and Me are visible above the characters' bangs.
• In El Goonish Shive, a raider bandit's eyebrows are visible floating in front of his helmet.

Western Animation

• The Angry Beavers. Mostly seen on Daggett's large unibrow.
• Razzberry Jazzberry Jam
  • Herschel (an Animate Inanimate Object handsaw) has eyebrows that float above his handle/head.
  • Certain characters (most notably Louis) have designs that exaggerate this- not only do their eyebrows float about their bodies, their eyes float above their bodies.
• Everyone (and we do mean everyone) in Welcome to Tonka Town has these.
• Yin Yang Yo! and possibly ¡Mucha Lucha!.
• FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman lampshades this when two of the second season contestants make a puppet of the host to use in a show. "Don't forget the eyebrows that float mysteriously above my head!"
• CGI example: Characters in BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn have their eyebrows sitting on top of their helmets, rather than being attached to their faces.
• Some characters (usually non-human) in Dora the Explorer.
• Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy.
  • Sometimes he also has a disembodied eye, though thats probably just a style thing.
    • Actually, if something large enough smacks him, it appears whatever eye was hanging off his head falls seperately of him.
• Oscar's Orchestra: Oscar the piano and Trevor the tuba have these inconsistently. Usually they get them when they're surprised or startled, but sometimes the animators draw them in for seemingly no reason at all.
• Cyborg from the Teen Titans cartoon was often shown with an unattached eyebrow on the robotic side of his face.
• Done subtly with Jenner in The Secret of NIMH: his eyebrows are never fully detached, but no part of them consistently stays on his face either.
• The Snorks.
• Most of the characters from Phineas and Ferb have these.
• Many of the characters in WordWorld.
• One Danger Mouse episode had DM negotiating with an alien. The alien agreed to leave in peace in exchange for Penfold's eyebrows. Penfold refused, but DM simply reached down and grabbed the floating eyebrows to hand them over. Penfold was very cross afterward, but DM assured him he'd grow a new pair.
• The main character of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera has this happen to him from time to time. At one point he raised them so high that they fell off and floated to the ground.
• In My Friend Rabbit, not only do the characters' eyebrows float, but Mouse's whiskers float as well.
• Used with several of the dinosaurs in Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs.
• Seen with several of the animal characters on Will and Dewitt.
• Al Alligator on the Playhouse Disney / Disney Junior short series Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?
• Fanboy and Chum Chum. All of the characters. It's the most noticeable with Sigmund, whose eyebrows are pitch black and rather thick, while his complexion is pale and his hair is white.
• Duckman sports a pair of these, along with eyes that are evidently attached to his glasses rather than his head.
• Angel the bunny from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Well, his whiskers, but still…
• A majority of the characters from Star vs. the Forces of Evil have these.
• A number of Manny's tools have them on Handy Manny.
• Several of the characters on Disney Junior's animated adaptation of Guess How Much I Love You exhibit disembodied whiskers, depending on what angle they're shown from.
• Seen on some of the animals on Justin Time (2011), a children's series on PBS Kids Sprout.
• Seen on worms on the Disney Junior CGI animated series The Hive:
  • Most of the characters on that show have disembodied hands and feet, and it can be very distracting, once you realize These characters have no arms or legs attaching their hands and feet to their bodies! (NB: You can see this on the show's page photo of Buzzbee, the star character.)
• The disembodied whiskers variant appears on TOTO (This One and That One) with all of the cat characters, including the title characters, This One and That One. They're all anthropomorphic cats. The series airs on an on-demand service in the United States called Kabillion Jr. and can also be watched officially and for free on YouTube.
• Mama Mirabelle's Home Movies goes one step further— certain of the characters, most notably Karla, as a member of the main cast, appear to have a disembodied eye when shown in profile.
• On Peg + Cat, Police Chief Toad has them.
• In Leap Frog — The Letter Machine Rescue Team, many of the letters have these, so though sometimes the appearance of it depends on what angle they're shown at.
• Wingnut in Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot.
• Similar to the Inside Out example, on Kate & Mim-Mim, Tach's float well above his head, due to his large eyes themselves being placed right the top of his head.
• Everyone on Kaeloo has these.
• The characters of the Prime Video animated version of Pete the Cat have these, though they're generally only seen when the characters are actually using them for expression.
• Fish possesses these on The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!.
• In The Crumpets, the eyebrows of characters like Li'l One, Ditzy, and Cassandra sometimes float.
• In Let's Go Luna!, all the characters' eyebrows float above their heads.
  • Similarly, Camp Lazlo, made by the same creator, also has most of the characters' eyebrows detached from their heads
• Futz!: The titular character has these.
• On Rhyme Time Town, the train, Jaime, has these.
• In The Loud House, Most of the characters' eyebrows can be seen through their hair.
• Dukey the talking dog from Johnny Test has these.
• The titular character of Courage the Cowardly Dog has these as well.
• On Bluey, All the characters' eyebrows float over their head.
• Some robots from Rusty Rivets has these.
• All of the characters in Codename: Kids Next Door has these. Numbuh 1, whose eyebrows are longer than most of the show's cast, is specially noticeable.
• On both original show and reboot of The Powerpuff Girls, The Mayor of Townsville has these.
• On Elinor Wonders Why, certain characters, such as the teacher Ms. Mole, have these when shown in profile.
• Brandy from Brandy & Mr. Whiskers sometimes has these.
• While not a normal component of the series Sid the Science Kid, random animals seen in the animated portions of songs, such as the frogs in the "Getting Into the Habit" song.
• Bubonic from Wunschpunsch.

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